Category: Marketing

Image credit: Larson Gross web site It’s been a busy day today. Prepping the house, yard and food for high school graduation celebration tomorrow as well as squeezing in a little mid-afternoon meeting.

But enough about me. This Fun Marketing Friday post is about a local company that is in an industry that, by any means of comparison, is usually considered as exciting as a popcorn fart. There are a lot of industries that could fit this description, banking, drywalling, collections, etc. But in this case, it is accounting. Continue reading “Fun Marketing Friday – June 17th”

“The marketing doom loop happens when you allow yourself to think that you do not need marketing when business is good and cannot afford marketing when business is bad.”

This adage has its cause rooted in fear. This can simply be a fear of making a mistake or even fear of success. I am complete empathetic to these feelings as I stake out on my own with Whatcom Marketing. So what is there to do about breaking free from the “deer in the headlights” or “doom loop” situations? Continue reading “Fixing the “Doom Loop””

It’s an election year in these parts so it makes sense to toss out some fundamental advice regarding campaigns that make use of social media and new media channels.

First is the recognition of how your messaging will play out across various personas, especially those who will want to either carry it forward or mock it using social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Recently presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, came out with the campaign slogan, “Win the Future.” When this is broken down to an acronym you get “WTF.” Now most everyone knows that’s not the best acronym associate with one’s campaign. While it gave the candidate a lot of attention right at the point of announcing their candidacy (enviable to be sure), many saw him as stumbling, falling and pronounced dead just as he was leaving the gate. The failing here was not testing the messaging outside of one’s own camp of “yes”-men. I just hope grandma doesn’t show up to church wearing a WTF t-shirt. Continue reading “How to run a political campaign in the age of new media”

In this age of the Internet and people having hundreds of followers on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, an unhappy customer can spread their version of what happened quicker than you can say, “What have you been smoking?”

In most cases, someone or something in your business screwed up and it’s likely you will need to address the incident and make changes to prevent it from reoccurring. But what if you did the right thing and it meant someone got a bum’s rush? That’s exactly what happened when a girl got booted for texting on her phone during a movie. For the sake of the other theatre goers, this theatre pissed her off.

But from this situation came some very effective messaging perfectly packaged to be both informative and entertaining to ensure the problem doesn’t occur again.

Here’s a great opportunity to get in front of people having a good time! The annual Old Settlers Picnic in Ferndale runs from July 28th to July 31st this year and they are still accepting Vendor Space Applications (near bottom of the page) for craft vendors and “informational type” booths.

I had an interesting sidewalk conversation with a friend recently that I’ll share with you. We were standing in front of a retail store-front business that was shuttering after a short (few months) attempt at launching. We both knew the owner and the issue of their lack of advertising came up. It’s good to know at this point that my friend has been quite successful selling print advertising for many years.

My friend pointed to the lack of advertising as their downfall. I said that there had to be much more to their situation than that. I went so far as to suggest it was probably best they hadn’t begun advertising during the early stage of their business anyway. That comment was met with a jaw-drop.

It’s probably good to know at this point that I have been referred to many times as the “unmarketing marketer.” That’s because I have never bought into the “you have to be doing something and a lot of it” reasoning that can be found behind a lot of wasted marketing budgets.

The conversation was over quickly and I believe it was punctuated with a statement ending with, “agree to disagree.”

Times are tough for a lot of industries, especially restaurants. So what do you do when the time comes to consider cutting your losses or changing your direction? Josh Silverman, owner/chef at Nimbus Restaurant, took the high-road of total transparency and issued a press releaseposted a letter on Facebook. He even did it a month ahead of time.

There is still lots to do but it seems the time is right to unveil and make available the services of Whatcom Marketing.

I’ve been spending a lot of time developing and designing processes to be implemented in the various stages of serving clients. The goal behind this effort is to create efficiencies to ensure minimal impact on the clients’ resources while also providing the most useful deliverable or outcome. It’s inevitable that all this will need to be adjusted, fine-tuned, and some even tossed out and started over but at least we have a starting point. And, as a believer in lean methods, time will always be allotted to ensure constant review and improvement.